[JPLA] Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance

Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America  |  Published: 2026-09-26

Category: 정권·선거 변동  |  Keywords: authoritarian, democracy, election, electoral, mexico, party, politics

Mexico's gubernatorial politics offer a revealing test case for a question that has vexed democratization scholars across Latin America and beyond: when an authoritarian-era ruling party survives the transition to competitive elections, does it lose because voters punish poor governance, or does it retain power through the sheer organizational weight of a decades-old machine? This question has taken on renewed urgency as Mexico, more than a quarter-century after the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency to Vicente Fox and the National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, continues to see former hegemonic-party structures persist at the subnational level even as Morena has become the new dominant force nationally. A forthcoming article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, titled "Authoritarian Legacies and Incumbency Advantage in Mexico's Gubernatorial Elections: Party Machines Over Performance," takes up exactly this puzzle, asking what has explained electoral success in Mexico's gubernatorial races in the post-transition period and how much governors themselves, through their own performance in office, actually shaped these outcomes.

The article's central argument, as its title makes explicit, is that party machines have mattered more than performance in determining gubernatorial electoral outcomes. This is a pointed claim within the broader literature on Mexican democratization, which has often assumed that the decentralization reforms accompanying the country's transition would create space for genuine retrospective voting, in which governors are rewarded or punished based on their record of public service delivery, corruption control, or economic management. Instead, the paper's framing suggests that democratic competition, once it was layered onto a decentralized federal structure inherited from the PRI era, did not simply neutralize the advantages built up by parties that had controlled state-level patronage networks, clientelist relationships, and local bureaucracies for generations. The argument that authoritarian legacies condition incumbency advantage implies that the same mechanisms that once allowed the PRI to dominate governorships, such as control over state payrolls, local media relationships, and municipal-level brokers, continued to confer electoral benefits on incumbent parties even after 2000, regardless of whether a given governor delivered strong results in office.

This finding resonates with broader regional patterns documented across Latin America's "third wave" democracies, where former single-party or military-aligned structures rarely disappeared simply because multiparty competition became legally possible. Mexico is a particularly instructive case because its transition was gradual and subnational rather than a single national rupture: PRI governors held onto numerous states long after Fox's 2000 presidential victory, and some, such as in Oaxaca or the State of Mexico, retained PRI control for well over a decade afterward before opposition parties or, later, Morena, managed breakthroughs. The article's emphasis on decentralization as a contributing factor is significant here, because Mexico's post-1990s fiscal and administrative decentralization reforms handed governors expanded budgets and patronage resources precisely at the moment multiparty competition was intensifying, potentially entrenching machine politics at the state level even as it opened the presidency and Congress to genuine alternation. This pattern parallels findings from Argentina's provinces and Brazil's state-level "coronelismo" legacies, where subnational political economies have proven far more resistant to democratizing pressures than national executive politics.

For researchers and institutions tracking political economy and civil society development in the Global South, including organizations like IOCSS that study how ODA-funded governance and civil society programs interact with local political structures, this article carries a clear methodological and policy implication: donor and technical-assistance interventions aimed at strengthening state-level accountability in Mexico, whether channeled through decentralization support, anti-corruption programming, or civil society oversight initiatives, cannot assume that electoral competition alone will generate incentives for governors to perform well. If party machines rather than performance are driving gubernatorial electoral outcomes, then civil society monitoring efforts, election observation, and public-sector reform programs need to explicitly target the organizational infrastructure of incumbent parties, such as clientelist patronage networks and control over local media and bureaucratic appointments, rather than focusing narrowly on performance metrics or transparency indicators that voters may not actually be using to make decisions at the ballot box. This has implications for how international partners design governance-focused ODA programming in decentralized federal states more broadly, since the Mexican case suggests that formal democratic transition and fiscal decentralization can coexist with, and even reinforce, entrenched local machine politics.

Looking forward, this study invites further comparative work examining whether Morena's rapid consolidation of gubernatorial power since 2018 is itself becoming a new version of the same authoritarian-legacy dynamic the paper identifies in the PRI's post-2000 persistence, or whether it represents a genuinely distinct, performance-linked mode of incumbency. Practitioners working on decentralization and local governance reform in Mexico and comparable federal Latin American states should treat the paper's core distinction, machine strength versus governor performance, as a diagnostic question to ask of any state before designing accountability interventions there. For researchers, the article's contribution to the Journal of Politics in Latin America adds empirical weight to a growing subfield examining how authoritarian-era subnational institutions outlive national-level democratization, a question with direct relevance well beyond Mexico, wherever former hegemonic parties retain regional strongholds long after national alternation has occurred.

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